The salesman and the developer

They arrive at the cabin in the woods and start unpacking the car, moving stuff into the cabin, getting things ready for a week of bear hunting in the wilderness. The salesman quickly gets bored of this and says:

“Tell you what, you continue unpacking and getting everything ready, and I’m going to go and find us a bear.”

The developer sighs and nods (he’s used to salesmen), and continues setting up while the salesman vanishes in the woods.

Half an hour later, as the developer is about three quarters done with getting things ready (the cabin is now all neat and tidy at last), he hears a very loud growl as he comes out of the cabin. Twenty metres away, the bushes start shaking. Out shoots the salesman. Right behind him, a huge, snarling, drooling, roaring monster of a bear. It’s twice the size of a normal bear, and it’s very, very angry.

As the developer hides behind a chair, the salesman runs right up to the cabin, with the bear on his heels, and just as he’s about to go through the door he quickly leaps to the side. The bear crashes past him right into the cabin, and the salesman deftly closes the door right behind, locking the bear in. Loud noises can be heard as the bear begins trashing the inside of the cabin.

The developer emerges from behind the chair. The salesman cheers and says:

“Woohoo! That’s the first one. Now, you kill him and skin him, I’ll go find us another!”

Two perspectives

There are two ways to understand this story, and which way you favoured largely depends on whether you’re a “builder” type or a “sales” type.

If you’re a builder type, you see this as a great story that illustrates a common problem with salespeople: they don’t seem to care about what happens after they make the sale. Actually delivering the project is hard work, but by then the sales guys have moved on to something else, so they don’t care (and, as an additional problem, in some industries the salespeople will sell stuff that can’t be realistically delivered).

However, if you’re a sales type (like my cofounder, Paulina), you have a different perspective on this story. It’s yet another story that makes fun of salespeople while completely discounting just how hard it is to not only find that damn bear, but bring it back and get it through the door.

Who’s right, then? Both, of course. In business, you need both to find and sell clients, and the ability to then deliver what you sold them. One without the other is not a business.

Sales is not optional

Many people who “do startups” these days are from a technology background. In other words, they’re builders rather than salespeople. And, like all builders, they tend to disregard sales as something that can happen later, something secondary that we’ll solve when we get to it.

Well, sales isn’t secondary. Speaking as a builder type myself, and having experienced businesses both with competent sales and without, I now believe that having someone whose job it is to go and find clients willing to give you money from day one is so important, that I would not start any company without such a person.

Sales don’t happen without someone energetically pushing the product, service, or whatever it is you’re intending to sell. Some may dream of products that sell themselves, like Dropbox or the original Apple II, but even awesome products like those took serious sales effort to get off the ground. Apple had Steve Jobs, one of the master salesmen of his generation, pushing the product everywhere he could and striking bold deals to get the company off the ground. Dropbox endlessly tweaked their referral scheme before they went viral.

Some few businesses like Google or Facebook or Instagram get to figure out the business model later. They can do without sales, perhaps. But this model only works in one place in the world, and unless you’re starting up in the Silicon Valley bubble, your business is not a business without sales.